Revolutionary Weather
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When you've spent your whole life looking at the same twelve months of the year on the calendar, it's hard to imagine something different. For most of us, hearing the word January is enough to give us a tiny mental shiver, and the word August seems to be coated in sweat. But what if the months of the year were actually named after weather events? That was the case some 200 years ago in France.

Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

The French Revolution transformed much of everyday life beginning around 1792, and the calendar was no exception. The revolutionaries ditched the Roman-based calendar used for hundred of years and started from scratch, partially to emphasize how the Revolution was changing things. In the new calendar, there were still 12 months, but all of them had 30 days. Each month's name was connected either to a crop or to a weather event. Thermidor, the month of heat, ran from July 19 to August 17. Later on came the month of fog, or Brumaire, followed by Frimaire, the month of frost. (Incidentally, there never was a Frigidaire.) The new calendar also had months named after snow, rain, and wind. This was all part of the same zeal for invention that produced the metric system. 200 years later, the whole world has gone metric (well, almost the whole world), but the French calendar didn't last long at all. Many folks resented having a day of rest only every 10 days, instead of each Sunday. When Napoleon took over, he kept some of the innovations from the revolution, but he also brought back the Roman-based calendar that's still in use across the world today.

The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. Our program is supported by Subaru and the National Science Foundation. Thanks today to assistant producer Doug Sanborn.